30/07/2012

• Chris Marker, 1921-2012 (La Jetée, 1962)

25/07/2012

newspaper No need to miss London last week as London came to us... well, for an evening at least. Rob Ryan has a show at the beautiful Charleston country house and was ferrying friends and family by the coach-load for the preview, so we headed down too. One of us drank milk, one of us drank juice, and the other had too much gin. As for the show, it's as you'd expect; brilliant.
newspaper Even if you feel you've seen a lot of of Rob's style recently (appropriated everywhere by big business), you'll reminded of his ceaseless creativity, innate decorative hand, touching aphorisms and disarming sincerity. If you're searching the area for inspiration this summer, then a visit to Charleston is essential... gin entirely optional.

• Maybe pick up your copy of SPQR (pictured) while you're there too

22/07/2012

Wiggins Wins!

Hip-hip-hooray for Bradley Wiggins... could there be a better name for a Brit cycle champ? Don't know why I've decided to celebrate with such a clunky/low-tech pic though; it's actually the conceptual prototype for an innovative folding commuter bike and one million mountainous miles away from the grueling Tour de France!

20/07/2012

It's odd that Wedgwood celebrated space-age achievement (on this day, 1969) in the cameo/sprig style called Jasperware, I thought it was a knowing joke when I saw it on a friend's kitchen shelf.

15/07/2012

Flip-Side



Fittingly, the BBC's been playing a glut of Woody Guthrie this weekend as America celebrates the centenary of its C20th folk hero. In mapping the movement of music from Europe (and beyond), something about early Americana puts me in mind of Hobo Nickels, those wonderful examples of Outsider Art. Altered by itinerant workers, railroad drifters, the disenfranchised and dispossessed, Hobo Nickels usurp the totemic symbols of the nascent US, replacing them with a counter-currency of personalised, painstaking, or puerile meaning. I'd love to make my own but modern coins are too tough for tooling!



• Visit Cabinet Magazine for full photo credits and excellent accompanying article

06/07/2012

Particulars


Our collective understanding of matter may well have altered with the observation of the Higgs boson field at CERN earlier this week, but even physicists need a piping-hot beverage to accelerate their particles now and again! Luckily our two new designs, Jungle Lion and Crocodile, arrived as samples yesterday. They're perfect... even the reprints of the other six guys (here and here) look better and brighter via the new supplier.